Drabbles
by Ameha Kay
Summary: A series of short one-shot drabbles
1. Chapter 1

Star Trek: Distant Shores By Ameha Kay

Reflections

Ambassador Tariq was on a yacht some distance upriver from Meshera and was admiring the beauty of the magnificent city while reflecting on the diplomatic mission she's on. These Hirazi are an amazing enigmatic race, she thought to herself. Even though the Federation crew members and civilian interns were completely alien in every way to their thinking process, they still interacted with them as if they were fellow beings in this sector. the welcome they received at the beginning of the mission was far more civil than many greetings they received in the Alpha Quadrant. the domicile in the posh Diplomat's Row district was extravagant beyond any the ambassador has ever stayed in the various Federation worlds she's gone to. These beings could bring shame to the enlightened Federation in it's treatment of alien beings and that's something she never expected when she was first contacted about this mission.

She had a beverage in her hand that was similar in texture to Earth's champagne and a local delicacy that's best described as kelp pasta was on the table, it tastes quite good despite it's odd green color. She was the guest of a local Dralbild, the lowest level council member in the Hirazi government hierarchy, he wanted to bring to her attention the local cuisine which she was now called Gilzdrim. she was quite glad he had; that was months ago but she loved the food so much that she was a frequent guest so that she could sample it when she can. the process of cooking it is not quite as simple as Earth spaghetti. it involved rinsing and pouring it, then cooking it again repeatedly then something beating it repeatedly with a paddle like instrument to let out as much as the planet's toxins as possible. this food was quite easily deadly if not prepared properly like the Japaanese puffer fish on Earth. 


	2. Chapter 2

Star Trek: Distant Shores By Adam Kriegel

Different Perspective

Domsjah Doolet looked at the cylindrical meat lying in the half-way cut bread that the loud vendor handed to him called a 'hot dog.' A dog is an Earth animal that some humans kept as companions and this strange food looked nothing like one. He saw how the humans ate this 'hot dog' and took a bite of it. the heat of this 'hot dog' was at least literal and along with the cold of the 'mustard' and 'ketchup' was a weird combination of animal meat and plant extracts unlike anything he's tasted back home on Zuo'Hiraz.  
Doolet was invited to a holo-parlor, a 3D environment generating room, by Admiral Del Torro. they were attending an ancient ballgame the humans played called soccer. it's still quite popular, with leagues or at the last soccer fields on every major human colony. the purpose was for 2 groups of 11 men or women to kick a ball around without picking it up with their hands towards their goal. there were similar games on various worlds of the Hirazi Coalition as well.  
The game was rather slow paced, various players from the opposing teams take the ball from one another and the ball switches from one side of the large grass field to the other quite frequently. Admiral Del Torro explained that there have been entire games where no goal was scored, which is archived by the ball entering the cube shaped structure that consists of a metal frame and a net. A man stands in front of it to prevent the entry, if the ball goes past him, the team get's a point. Doolet found it interesting for a while but the slow pace eventually wore out his patience, but he was too polite to say so.  
The planet achieved something that's a rarity among most societies: they were able to maintain their diversity. Doolet has very rarely been to a world where more than only a handful of languages survived historically. The societies that originated from the European continent achieved some success taking over large swats of this planet, but many other groups survived intact. Admiral Del Torro in fact spoke a language at home that was different from the one he heard while dealing with Starfleet called Spanish.  
The Earth society that was most interesting were the ones called Chinese. they did not believe in a deity, they revered their ancestors, and some idolized an ancient human named Buddha that achieved some kind of inner peace through meditation that he called nirvana but none actually worshiped deities like the other societies of this world.  



	3. Chapter 3

Star Trek: Distant Shores By Adam Kriegel

A Night in the Museum

The History Museum of Alquon in the Imperial District of Meshera was the premiere museum of Zuo'Hiraz that had nearly six hundred thousand artifact from various regions of Zuo'Hiraz and the colony worlds. Captains Forrester and Johnston went there with Ambassador Tariq, a few specialists and the Hirazi liaison to the expedition Voldzigos Sangi Bobfisbow. a museum tour guide was showing them various items.

It had the usual monoliths, edifices, jewelry and stone tools, etc ubiquitous to every humanoid inhabited worlds. One statue was a city wall from a nearby site that had quartz of similar color to the Hirazi skin tone and eyes made of amethyst that rivaled the ancient Egyptian pharaoh masks of earth. it stood at nearly 4 meters, it was the likeness of a royal figure from an ancient kingdom that was one of the power players of this region of Zuo'Hiraz.

There were also fossils of various ancient fauna and flora that were as magnificent as the dinosaurs of Earth and the dongiwazeng of Canopus. one fossil was in fact two animals, a predator attacking it's pray that was buried by a flash flood. the predator, called a Jighishilt, a type of saber toothed cat, had it's mouth clamped on the neck of a Brizdebon, type of bull similar to an African Okapi. The region they were discovered in was a floodplain that frequently experienced flash flood even in the present time, the fossils were found a century ago after they were buried 50,000 years ago.

The museum operated open 27 hours a day, people from hundreds of worlds visit every day. the group enjoyed the excursion and saw many unique items. the musuem has two building of approximately sixty hundred square meters of space, one for the displays and the other for research and storage. Johnston particularly enjoyed the hominid displays as she expected and Forrester enjoyed the monoliths laden with epic poems, legal codes and propaganda messages glorifying the various kings that had them built.  



	4. Chapter 4

Star Trek: Distant Shores By Adam Kriegel

Brief Respite

The edifices of the skyscrapers of Meshera glittered in the distance on the coast 3 kilometers away. The senior officers of the starships Ibn Battuta and Gates of the Starfleet expedition to the Hirazi Coalition were relaxing on a boat of a local businessman throwing a birthday celebration for a local politician he has been friends with since grade school.

Brianna and Alex were sampling the great foods of this magnificent world. taste wise, its a cross between Earth's Chinese and Mediterranean cuisines. the blandness of some ingredients contrasted with the strong taste of the spices. the Hirazi party goers towered over the Starfleet officers, conversations are smooth thanks to the universal translators. they nevertheless managed to learn some Hirazi words and teach their hosts some English.

Hirazi politics aren't like politics of the Federation or it's neighbors. There's very little turmoil since unification; during the days of individual sovereign nation-states, they fought amongst themselves like everywhere else but not as vicious as some have been, especially in Earth history. Hirazi skin tones vary from purple to orange but hasn't been an issue in several millennia, before the reign of Althara yangi Thara.

The provinces of Zuo'Hiraz are the vestiges of the regional alliances of nation states which formed into political unions. The city of Meshera became an independent political union thousands of years ago as the capital city of the Alqoun nation-state and eventually the world government.

As the capital of the Hirazi Coalition, the expedition uses Ambassador Tariq's residence on Zuo'Hiraz as a base for staging and shore leave. Thousands of Gigabytes of data have been gathered in this region of space that would not have been acquired for decades until the natural expansion of the Starfleet's exploration of the galaxy.

T'Malya found the ambiance of Zuo'Hiraz interesting as much as a Vulcan could. The history of this world isnt as violent as the worlds she is familiar with which was provocative; she anticipated the essays and commentary on this once the expedition returns to Federation space. 


	5. Chapter 5

this is a tribute to Michael Jackson written on the first anniversary of his death

Star Trek: Distant Shores By Adam Kriegel

Victory of a King

Brianna Johnston's uncle Heng introduced her to the talent and magnificence of Michael Jackson and his brothers when she was in grade school and she has been listening to the audio recordings and interacting with him on the holodeck ever since. Every August 29th and June 25th she would spend a few hours on the holodeck either dancing with him or attending (by proxy at least) one of his many concerts in his 40 years long career. She has watched each and every musical event multiple times over the decades ever since she was young and he was her first crush. She would celebrated every August 29th and June 25th unless circumstances wouldn't allow it, in which case she'd celebrate the next day. Sometimes she wished that she had lived 400 years ago just for the chance of physically going to a Michael Jackson concert.

August 29th 2408 had been a special day for her, being the 450th anniversary of his birth, she arranged for shore leave that day and went home to Earth to spend the day with her uncle and watch Michael Jackson flat videos all day with him. That particular day happened to be June 25th 2409, the 400th anniversary of his death and she planned to spend it on the holodeck watching one of the Victory tour concerts on the holodeck which took place in the year 1984 through out the United States.

Being that she has been several thousand light years from Earth for the last few months made it so that she couldn't celebrate this day with her uncle so the victory tour concert would have to do. she chose the Los Angeles concert at Dodger's Stadium on December 8th, 1984. She sat in the middle area of the hall, far enough away from the stage to see it all and yet close enough to clearly see the Jacksons. there was also a giant screen above the stage, called at the time the jumbo-tron.

The concert started with the standard 'Wanabe startin something?" from the Thriller album. all his movements were precise and magical. the holographic crowd around her were cheering as loudly as they could. Michael and his brothers went through to the standards: 'the love you save', 'Beat it', 'human nature', 'this place hotel', 'billie jean', 'i want you back' and 'off the wall' among other songs.

She skipped the breaks and a couple of the songs she has not been very familiar with sang by Michael's brother Jermaine. The moonwalk was as amazing as the first one or the last one he performed a decade and a half later. the camaraderie he displayed with his brothers brought to the Victory tour(and previous tours with them) are not there in the future tours later in his career. This anniversary has been by far the best one she has celebrated, unfortunately though uncle Heng couldn't join her.

This concert was at the prime of Michael's physical and musical prowess. Brianna had almost an encyclopedic knowledge of details of his life as if she were the author of his biography. She loved Michael more if not more than the contemporary singers of the late 24th century. She barely listened to any current singers, of which she knew any details only due to her friends speaking of them. Michael has had few rivals before or sense across the whole of the Federation.

Once the concert finished, Brianna walked back to her quarters. Few people on the expedition or back home on Earth or Luna understood her allure with Michael Jackson except uncle Heng. Viewing the video records though of that time period whenever Michael went anywhere, the frenzy around him made sense to her. 


	6. Chapter 6

Star Trek: Distant Shores By Adam Kriegel

Steps Towards Equality

Devon Johnston hopes were realized with Starfleet, an organization that epitomized modern Earth culture and society that took centuries of turmoil to achieve until finally society nearly collapsed during World War III and then the glory of First Contact. Initially, even after First Contact, tendrils of the hate and paranoia of 'the other' transferred from humans of different skin tones to extraterrestrials until the actions of Paxton's Terra Prime showed the wrongness of such feelings in civilized beings.

He grew up reading about all those things, first in his native Australia to his Aboriginal ancestors then other non-Europeans in other regions of Earth. Upon his graduation from high school, he went on a tour of various museums around the world of the racial unity of Earth: in South Africa, Israel, USA, South America.

By far the most interesting were the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, TN, USA because it covered slavery and the civil rights struggle of the 19th and 20th centuries in the United States and while he was in Memphis, he also visited the ancient Graceland mansion, the resisidence of the still highly popular musicisian Elvis Aaron Presley.

The Civil Rights museum consisted of ancient audio visual records from the 20th century, recreations (and sometimes original) of items used by both the government and the freedom fighters in the struggle for equal rights.

Elvis Presley and his residence Graceland still enthralled people in the 24th century as much as he did in his lifetime and several decades after his decade. Devon wasn't much of a fan of Elvis or of that time period but he had friends that were so he knew a bit of it.  



	7. Chapter 7

Star Trek: Distant Shores By Adam Kriegel

Cloak and Dagger

A Cold War not unlike the one on 20th century Earth raged outside the walls of the apartment building inhabited at the moment by Brianna Johnston.

She was assigned to the world Shigband as part of one of her anthropology classes on the effect of politics and how they affect anthropological expeditions.

Anthropological expeditions have been off and on on this world for almost 15 decades depending on the government. some governments were quite xenophobic about outsiders and some were more willing to share their world with the scientists.

The Shigbandi were an average sized humanoids very athletic and equally intellectual with scientific theories that bordered on the scale of Einstein and Da Vinci once they are willing to join the Federation. they have become space faring only within the couple centuries but were unwilling to join the Federation when they were first invited above their first manned warp flight.

Brianna finally understood the points of the class when she saw the list of what was allowed and not allowed by the government in the study.

there were many restrictions as to what could be analyzed. and many that would make the proposed research objectives difficult achieve.  



	8. Chapter 8

TrekBBS has a monthly challenge series...for january 2012 the challenge was beginnings...i typed this up quickly and entered it

Star Trek: Distant Shores By Adam Kriegel

Personal Log Supplemental

I enjoy xeno-anthropology to an extent that few do. It amazes me greatly that the humanoids all over the galaxy all evolved on their different worlds from one source, the ancient progenitors that seeded all the worlds billions of years ago.

Reading about the discovery by my hero Jean Luc Picard helped my decision to join Starfleet and to study xeno-anthropology once there. After all these years, it finally all paid off. The various research stations, the interviews, the incessant essays are now finally worth it.

i got a call earlier about an alien ship showed up in Federation space inviting for us to send a ship to their sector as part of an exchange program. they study our culture and initiate a diplomatic exchange and we sound back our own envoy!

The Federation Diplomatic Envoy to the Hirazi Coalition as it will be called i just got assigned to would ensure that i, Brianna Johnston, captain of the USS Ibn Battuta, would likely inspire a future cadet just as Captain Picard had inspired me.


End file.
